Of all the variations of human behavior actors portray on screen, autism may be one that the movies find easiest to signal. Fill a refrigerator with identical boxes of microwaveable macaroni and cheese, have your leading man rock back and forth, repeat phrases, and occasionally bang his head against something, and audiences will get the message. Do that with any sense of nuance, and you just might get nominated for an Academy Award, like Tom Hanks, Sean Penn, and Dustin Hoffman did for their portrayals of characters with autistic traits in weepies like Forrest Gump, I Am Sam, and Rain Man, the most famous pop culture document on autism.

Portrayals of autistic characters have been popular since Elvis teamed up with a posse of inner-city nuns (including Mary Tyler Moore) to help cure a poverty-stricken girl’s autism in 1969’s Change of Habit, and not simply since such roles are an awards lock. Stereotypical characters with autism are a convenient and powerful device for convincing neurotypical people to mend their ways, or for demonstrating the saintliness of the people who put up with them. These cinematic conceits make HBO’s Temple Grandin, a biopic of the acclaimed animal scientist and autism advocate (to premier on HBO on February 6 at 8 p.m.), particularly remarkable. From the life of one of the best-known individuals with an autism spectrum disorder, director Mick Jackson has managed to make an utterly original movie about autism, simply by allowing Grandin, portrayed in a stunning performance by Claire Danes, to be the center of her own story.

The standard for Danes’ performance, of course, is Rain Man. It’s clear from the first scene of that movie that Charlie Babbitt—the main character, played by Tom Cruise—is a fairly terrible person. It takes only a little bit longer to explain that his autistic-savant brother, Raymond, will be the agent of Charlie’s moral improvement. Raymond’s life changes marginally after his brother takes him on an impromptu roadtrip; he learns to trust Charlie and to disavow K-Mart. But the movie still ends with Raymond on a train headed back home to an institution in Cincinnati and to the routines that define his existence. The real transformation is in Charlie, who learns to love and defend his brother’s capacity to love him back—and to treat his girlfriend better in the process. Raymond may be an extraordinary creation by Dustin Hoffman, but he’s still a device produced when Charlie needs to change, and stowed back away once he’s no longer a necessary catalyst.

Adam, a 2009 romance about the relationship between a Beth, a privileged young woman, and Adam, a young man with Asperger’s syndrome, is even blunter in its uses of autism as a moral barometer for neurotypical people. Among the early signs Beth has that Adam’s brain works differently from her own is his reluctance to give her his laundry card when she forgets hers, and that he doesn’t offer to help carry her groceries up the stairs. At the end of the film, the audience is supposed to see that Adam’s made progress because he offers to help a new coworker with a pile of boxes. It’s a weirdly servile view of Adam’s growth, measuring his progress solely in his utility to other people. Beth is supposed to be rewarded for her goodness in even deigning to date her strange neighbor. She dumps Adam for not loving her in the way she wants, then uses a story he told her as the basis for her first book. It’s as if by briefly resisting her monstrous father, who wanted her to leave Adam from the start, Beth has done something heroic.

In refreshing contrast, the point of Temple Grandin is not to prove the goodness of Grandin’s mother, aunt, and high school science teacher, though their goodness is manifest, and its impact in her life is clear. The support they give Grandin at various points, whether getting her admitted to a school for the gifted, or encouraging her love of animals, is not saintliness, but stubbornness and independence.

Most of the time, Grandin is on her own in the movie, facing up to circumstances far worse than those Raymond or Adam experience. When the cattlemen at a stockyard where she’s working on her master’s thesis dump bull’s testicles all over her windshield, she condemns them for wastefulness—and later uses the incident to convince an agricultural magazine to begin publishing her articles. And when she braves an automatic door at a supermarket, long one of her fears, the woman who helps her on the way out turns out to be married to an executive at a slaughterhouse, where she gets her first major job. Grandin, and nobody else, reaps the benefits of her own bravery and growth.

And Temple Grandin doesn’t fall into the trap of imposing a conventional romantic subplot on a woman who has said clearly and repeatedly that she is uninterested in marriage or long-term partnership. Rain Man couldn’t resist getting Raymond a smooch from his brother’s sympathetic girlfriend, and Adam ended up judging its main character by rigid romantic rules, rather than forcing Beth to confront her expectations and prejudices. Other than a sly shot of Grandin channel-surfing past From Here to Eternity to a nature program, the movie is content to accept Grandin’s definitions of what’s important, and to leave romance outside of those boundaries.

It’s just one of many ways that the movie accepts Grandin’s perspective as dominant. Rain Man offered occasional, beautiful flashes of what Raymond sees in the geometry of a bridge or the supports in a roadside crash barrier, but the movie never spent very long looking out from his eyes. And Adam mostly shows its audience how Beth sees the things Adam tries to show her, like the Central Park raccoons she turns into a cute fictional family for her book, or the projections of stars and galaxies he has set up in his apartment. The movie’s idea of showing viewers how disoriented Adam feels in social circumstances is to stick him and Beth in a restaurant inexplicably full of people in masks.

Temple Grandin, in contrast, makes extensive use of techniques like sketching and rapid slideshows of images to demonstrate how Grandin literally experiences the world. The movie uses a framing device of an opening door, both as a psychological technique Grandin uses to calm herself at moments when she takes substantial risks, and as a literal manifestation of her interest in engineering and her fear of automatic doors. There are moments when it seems a little cheesy, until Grandin explains to her mentor that when she thinks of an object like a shoe, all of her memories of such a thing are present at once. As neurotypical members of the audience, our inability to see all those doors—and the weight of all those decisions—at the same time is our limitation, and perhaps our loss.

Not every person with autism will grow up to be like Temple Grandin, and not all movies will benefit from the template—and counsel—of a living subject like her. But HBO’s fine biopic serves as an important reminder that people with autism spectrum disorders are individuals rather than collections of tics, that, as Charlie yells at Raymond in Rain Man, “You can't tell me that you're not in there somewhere!” They, their families, and all of us deserve movies that recognize that they are more than their traits, whether onscreen or off. Adam speaks for all of us when he reminds Beth, who has come to apologize with chocolate, “I’m not Forrest Gump, you know!”

About the Author

Most Popular

Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.